


Take Me Home

by TheFlashFic



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: De-Serumed Steve Rogers, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), off-screen torture mentions, the rest of the AoU-era Avengers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-18
Updated: 2015-08-18
Packaged: 2018-04-15 11:32:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4605129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFlashFic/pseuds/TheFlashFic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain America vanishes. What comes back is a 90 pound asthmatic Steve Rogers, with heavy scarring on his heart and not much time left to him, unless his team can find a way to reverse what's been done. The one man who knows how to handle a stubborn, sick, scrawny Steve is still struggling to get his own mind and memories back from HYDRA. </p><p>Luckily, Sam Wilson exists.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take Me Home

**Author's Note:**

> My second foray into the fandom, and yes, I picked a total trope to write about. This is going to be a pretty long one, I suspect. I'm three chapters in already, and having fun getting back to my old h/c angsty roots. 
> 
> Warnings for off-screen torture, some elements of physical dysphoria, a lot of talk of sickness and disease as well as some ableist responses to all of the above. This is Sam/Steve/Bucky all the way, but the build-up is going to be slow. I trade in happy endings, so. Spoiler. Also I'm a gigantic Sam stan, so despite the summary I promise this is going to be way more than a 'Sam takes care of everyone' fic.
> 
> Title taken from Guns n' Roses Paradise City, because that's the kind of nerd I am.

_ Captain America's been torn apart _  
_ Now he's a court jester with a broken heart _  
_ He said— _  
_ Turn me around and take me back to the start _

* * *

 

There was a low sound, nearly lost below the blast of firepower, the drone of Jarvis, insistent with his updates, and the shouts and calls from the rest of the group all chaotic and piling up in his ear. It would have been easy to miss, except Tony was taking a pause from the immediate fighting to try to pull up a schematic of the base using Jarvis and radar, which might’ve helped speed this along.

The sound, the voice, was Hawkeye. Usually the last to speak up, usually the quietest and, okay, probably the one most worth listening to when he did speak up. He’d gone inside with Natasha during the initial strike, and they were the ones Tony wanted to be able to give some kind of directions to, since they went in blind.

Considering how long they’d been waiting for this, and how highly strung they all were, it was a surprisingly soft, almost sad kind of sound, Hawkeye’s quiet but unmistakable:

“Aw, Cap.”

Something about the softness of it, the way it was more breath than words, like Steve had been caught with his hand in a cookie jar, something about the lack of urgency had the opposite reaction in Tony. It made everything else in his ears fade back, if only for a moment, and made his heart thud hard and his hands fist inside the suit.

Nobody asked.

Everyone went quiet, at least for a moment.

But the thunder of guns continued, and Tony found himself having to dodge a completely ridiculous attempt to blow him out of the air via RPG, which of course meant he had to dive down and take out the turkey who’d tried something so archaic.

“Where are you, Hawkeye? I’m coming your way,” Natasha then spoke in Tony’s ear, and the silence was broken. Thor demanded the Captain’s status, and Tony rasped for Jarvis to hurry up with that blueprint even as he dived and sprayed out fire to take out the goons who were still rushing out the doors like this base was some kinda HYDRA clown car.

The Ghost...his only sounds came in the form of bullets, of screams left in his wake. But then he wasn’t a particularly chatty guy on a good day.

“Negative, Widow,” Hawkeye spoke after a minute. “I got this. We’ll rendezvous outside. Stark? Got some computers in here I figure you’re gonna want to get some info off of.”

“On the way,” Tony confirmed, arcing up over the building. “Jarvis, show me life signs.”

The building below glowed with the sudden overlay of vaguely people-shaped light, and Tony scouted around. Plenty of soldiers, still, damn it. There was one entire crowd of them with a quick-moving blob in the middle. Natasha. She was fighting fast, which meant unhurt, so he moved on. A few hurried forms moving in ones and twos, probably scientist types try to evacuate. Worth scooping up, probably, but Tony passed them by as well.

And there, there were two blobs moving apart from the others, close together, lurching towards the brand new exit Hulk had thoughtfully carved out for them to get Hawkeye and Widow inside. Really close together, Tony saw as he arced down towards them.

“Are you carrying him?” he asked incredulously, picturing massive Steve swooning in a pair of spindly normal-sized arms (and okay, that was inaccurate and gave Hawkeye too little credit, but come on).

“Don’t worry about us,” Hawkeye answered, hardly even sounding winded. Maybe Steve was carrying him? “We left the room with the computers behind, about ten meters back.”

Tony frowned, but swooped past the blobs and fired a blast at the roof to open up access. He aimed for the corridor, not the room itself, not wanting to damage potential evidence, and when he hit the ground inside he couldn’t help glancing back towards those lurching blobs of light. But the whole place was dark, and his entrance had filled the hall with smoke and dust, so he turned away after a moment and tromped heavily into the room.

It looked like a hospital in there. A hospital with a whole wall of hard drives and monitors. He didn’t look too long at the bed, didn’t try to determine what color the stains on it were in the darkness, or what all the equipment around it was for. He did fist his hands as he looked past it to the computers. “Jarvis?”

“Each system appears to run separately, sir, I see no expedient way to collect whatever information the systems contain. They will have to be done individually, which would take approximately--”

“Too much time.” Tony glared at the wall of servers. Honestly, the fuck was this? 1984? “How’s the structure?”

“Secure, sir. I suggest--”

“Way ahead of you,” Tony said even as he turned and left the room behind. End the fighting, clear the building, and then work on harvesting info.

HYDRA was a dying animal, so any scrap of evidence they could get was one more nail in the coffin. Considering how long people had been trying to nail that coffin closed, that wasn’t something Tony was willing to overlook. Still, he’d left Widow in a pile of agents, god only knew where the Ghost was taking out his rage, Thor and Hulk were on the outside being testosteroney with whoever made it out of the building, and this team needed to stay a team as much as they possibly could with their leader compromised.

So he found the hole he’d made coming in and used it to jet right back out, swooping right back the way he came and trying to find Widow to lend a hand.

 

* * *

 

The jet wasn’t far away, tucked under a tree cover and idling. Hawkeye had reported in when he got Cap safely inside, which had sent a wave of relief over the grimness of the fighting. Tony found Widow, helped her deal with the stragglers inside, sent her back to see if she could take one or two of those scientists down alive.

It was a mark of how worried she was that she nodded and took off without a single argument.

Outside there were HYDRA agents literally piled up around the doorways. Some breathing, some not, but Tony wasn’t inclined to cry either way. SHIELD was on their way, they could handle the footsoldiers and bury the bodies.

Once Tony reached sunlight he saw the Ghost first, which was a surprise. He could hear Hulk roaring in the distance somewhere, grabbing up anyone who’d made it into the trees beyond the base. No clue where Thor was, but Tony suspected the jet. As much as he prided himself on being a warrior, Thor had a soft spot for fallen comrades, and he’d taken Steve’s disappearance as hard as any of them had.

From the way the Ghost was fighting when Tony saw him - two guys against him, soon down to one, and then almost instantly none - he figured this was the source of most of the non-breathing bodies. The Ghost had never been trained to hurt or knock out, he’d been trained to kill. And he truly believed there was no reason to want any of these men to keep breathing.

He was only The Ghost in Tony’s head, and only because his other names didn’t seem to fit. The Winter Soldier was a shadow and a body count, an enemy, and given the circumstances it seemed cruel to think of a man who was slowly reclaiming his mind as the assassin his captors had twisted him into. But he sure as hell wasn’t Bucky Barnes, either, and the few times anyone had tried calling him Bucky had only made the guy shut down entirely.

So, whatever. He was a dead man walking, why not think of him as a Ghost? The guy wasn’t offering any better suggestions.

Out loud, though, Tony stuck with his habit of using whatever obnoxious nicknames he could think of. Luckily as little as the Ghost seemed to have going on upstairs in terms of independent thought, he always seemed to recognize when Tony was referring to him.

“Hey, Kurt Cobain, I think the green guy’s got it from here.”

Those flat blue eyes peered over at Tony, and stayed locked on him even as the Ghost wrenched the head of his current straggler to the side, snapping his neck and making him drop to the ground in a heap.

Tony blinked. “Okay, that’s creepy. Look, fight’s over, pal, no need to overdo it. Clean-up crew’s on the way.”

The Ghost just turned back to the building, fisting his hands, both flesh and beautiful, beautiful metal, and tensed like he was going to march in.

“Rogers is in the jet,” Tony tried.

The Ghost looked over again. He glanced back behind them towards the tree cover that would lead to the parked quinjet, and then back at the for-now-quiet building. He straightened up, unclenched his fists, and darted back into the trees.

Tony sighed. The guy was solid, big, weighed down by that glorious arm he wouldn’t even let Tony look at up close, but he was a quick bastard when he wanted to be.

Tony took off into the air over the trees, but remembered the servers. He frowned. “How’s Cap doing?” he asked into his comm, hovering over the building, worried that if he let it out of his sight those computers would vanish.

“We need to get him somewhere,” came Widow’s answer, and her voice seemed...strange. Pinched.

Tony frowned. “Jarvis?”

“At least half an hour to access each individual server and copy its information, sir. You could always ride back with SHIELD.”

“We’re gonna need any information you can access, Stark,” Natasha said, as if she could either hear Jarvis - she couldn’t - or sense his indecision.

He wasn’t low enough on fuel to worry about getting home on his own, but he couldn’t deny there was a pull to get back to the jet, to get a look at Steve for himself, see that he was okay and figure out just what the hell people were acting so squirrely for.

He growled to himself and dove back towards the building and that little hospital-slash-server room. It was no less creepy the second time. “Okay, if accessing the servers is gonna take time, let’s just take them with us instead.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Five minutes, Romanov.”

“Leaving in five,” she replied, grim, and he had no doubt that at five minutes and one second she’d have that jet in the air.  

He studied the setup, the wall of hardware shells all stacked up together. With a frown he debated his options - he could fuse them all together and fly them out, but the mass of them wouldn’t fit in the jet easily. So, screw it. He marched over and started tearing the units open one by one, pulling the hard drives and stacking them up.

He took six minutes, but when he took off with the bundle of hard drives wrapped in a don’t-think-about-it stained bed sheet, the jet was in the air but still hovering, waiting. It was more than he thought he’d get, downright touching, really, so he blasted straight to the cargo door and inside without a word, and the jet took off the moment he was in.

He dropped the tied-off sheet and the drives, sliding his faceplate up and sighing at the coolness of outside air. “Okay, naptime,” he said to his suit, and obediently it shifted and opened around him, beginning the quick process of shelving itself in the housing closet he’d built into the jet.

Left in jeans and his second favorite Pantera t-shirt, Tony shook off the familiar sensation of suddenly being small and light and insubstantial, and headed to the front of the jet.

“Bruce?” he called out first, as was his usual.

“Got him. He’s in with Steve,” came Widow’s voice from the front. Her and Hawkeye were in their familiar spots in the drivers’ seats, nothing but tired heads of hair from Tony’s viewpoint.

Tony smiled faintly. Five minutes might have been a record time for Hulk-in-fight-mode transitioning back to helpful-Bruce. Needs must, he figured, and there went his smile.

The jet was smaller than the carrier, obviously, but it had room enough for a few different spaces. The little closet designated ‘medical’ was the one that got used most often, probably. Unfortunately.

He found Thor standing outside the door, arms folded, bloody and grim. Standing guard. Something about it made Tony’s spine straighten a bit, but as he approached Thor’s face softened.

“How’s it going in there?” Tony asked, wary.

Thor regarded him. “There are a great many things about this world of yours that I don’t understand, and don’t wish to understand.”

Tony blinked, but as he got closer Thor stepped away from the door to let him in, so he just breathed out. “I guess that’s an answer to something,” he said, moving in as the door slid open.

It was crowded in there even when empty, a mass of generalized equipment meant to handle as many injury types as possible, and the overlarge bed meant to handle as many body types as possible. Today it was especially crowded, with Bruce, disheveled and slumped with weariness, standing pressed too close to the monitors he was studying. The single chair in the room already occupied by a broad, hunched assassin Ghost.

Tony pushed his way in regardless, taking in everything. “So what’s the…”

He stopped when his eyes found the bed.

The bed was Thor-sized, though Thor had only needed it once before. Worst case scenario and all. It meant that when Steve was in it - and he had been a few times now thanks to his insistence about rushing into everything like he was immortal himself - it was pretty much perfectly sized for him. Steve Rogers took up a lot of space. He wasn’t quite as tall and broad as the actual god from outer space, but he was no shrimp.

Whoever was in that bed right then? Was a shrimp.

Tony frowned, approaching the bed, wondering if wires were crossed somewhere. Judging from the insubstantial way the sheet over him tented up in not enough places, this was somebody’s teenager or something. This wasn’t even a fully sized adult much less a super soldier.

Tony peered at the Ghost’s hunched back, and moved around him to see what the hell was…

The hell, apparently, was a pile of bones wrapped in skin. Knobby shoulders and near concave chest that rattled with short, audible breaths. Sallow and pale skin, a sharp angled face that was all cheekbones and hollows, thin eyelids covering deeply shadowed eyes, and blond hair that was...the only recognizable thing in that bed.

It was the nerves, the surprise, that made Tony react. It sure as hell wasn’t humor. But when he opened his mouth what came out was a startled, staccato laugh. “What the hell…?”

“Tony!” Bruce’s voice was unnaturally sharp.

Tony swallowed, instantly regretting the nervous laughter. Still, he couldn’t get his eyes off the form in the bed. The ridiculously frail, spindly form. He found himself feeling really, really glad that this person, this ridiculous not-Steve, wasn’t conscious.

“What the hell is this?” he asked again, because he surely wasn’t the only one who saw the absurdity here.

The Ghost looked up then, and the absurdity just got even worse. Because the guy Tony couldn’t think about as an actual person, this expressionless near-mute ex assassin who did nothing but kill and eat Tony’s food and bitch about Avengers taking too damned long to find their missing man, was grinning as he looked up.

Bright-eyed, focused, smiling like there was nothing in that room he was unhappy about. And he answered, out loud, in a voice that sounded nothing like the Ghost’s normal reluctant gravel.

“Steve,” he said, sounding young and very much human. “It’s Steve.”

 

 

* * *

 

The little medical room was too small for three people to hang around in, that’s what Tony told himself when he turned and basically, yes, fled.

Timing was good, though, because as he made his way up to the front, feeling surreal and still unsatisfied that anyone else was appreciating the absurdity of the day, Widow called back to him.

“Hill wants to know where we’re taking him.”

“The Tower,” he said instantly, because where else? Nobody was trusting SHIELD with shit these days, and he was no different. “See if you can get hold of Cho, meet us there.”

There was no response, which was basically a yes because none of these people hesitated to argue with Tony when they disagreed. He moved up to the cockpit anyway, looking out at the slowly dimming afternoon. Nobody seemed to make any course adjustments, which meant they were already en route to NYC, which didn’t surprise him at all.

Natasha glanced back at him.

He laughed, another nervous flutter of laughter that was really not like him, christ, man.

Her face was set in stone. Only her words gave away her feelings. “We can reverse this, right?”

“Reverse what? I can’t even…” But even as Tony answered he realized that of course he knew what happened. They all knew. The serum. HYDRA found some way to reverse what Erskine did seventy years ago.

So. The supersoldier serum that many had tried but none had duplicated since World War Two...could it be figured out? Could the reversal be reversed?

Tony Stark may have been confused, along with acquiring a sudden nervous-laughter reaction that was frankly disturbing, but he was still Tony Stark. He had equipment, more brains than were strictly safe, money, and more importantly he had Bruce Banner and Helen Cho. Of course they’d reverse it.

But he thought of that painfully tiny person in the bed back in medical, and he couldn’t answer her out loud. He just grinned, tight and thin, and barely stopped himself from flashing a big thumbs-up in response. Jesus, Stark, get it together.

She didn’t seem reassured as she turned back to the controls.

Hawkeye never looked at him once.

 

* * *

 

Tony wasted time once they landed, hanging around the empty cockpit idly as the others maneuvered the man they’d picked up out of bed and onto a medi-transport that had been set up and waiting for them.

He checked his phone for updates. Cho was on the way, good. SHIELD was still mopping up, who cared. They had a lot of prisoners to transport. That was very good.

“Welcome back, sir,” Jarvis said, as ever, as Tony finally strode into his rooms and scowled around at nothing, trying to figure out why he hadn’t even wanted to see that floating stretcher and its grim honor guard make their way inside. “You have a visitor, sir. Sam Wilson.”

“Hey, Sam, great, send him up.” He paced over to the bar and poured himself a generous shot. He made it even more generous the moment he realized that no, he wouldn’t be the bearer of good news to Sam, not really. He’d be the bearer of fucked up and confused news.

He’d only met Sam face to face a couple of times before, once at Steve’s side after Tony flew his ass to DC to check on the sudden and thorough demise of the agency he’d been trusting for years. And once alone, after Steve vanished. He seemed like a good guy. Steve trusted him, which normally wouldn’t have satisfied Tony because Steve was a gullible nerd. But Steve also smiled around him, which had been weird and exotic and did a lot to win Tony’s favor.

Tony downed his drink in two burning and oh-so-satisfying swallows, and steeled himself. “Jarvis, divert Wilson to wherever they’re settling the, uh...I mean, Cap.” He frowned, but shook it off. If it was Steve it was Steve. “I’ll meet him there.”

Jarvis rattled off floor and room and Tony strode to the elevator before he could stop himself. He wasn’t all that eager to embrace what had apparently happened, and please baby jesus he didn’t want to start laughing again, but hey. It was a challenge. And Tony Stark never met a challenge he didn’t rise to.

He beat Wilson by about thirty seconds, but was still hovering in the corridor outside the door. Not reluctant to face this shriveled Steve Rogers again, just...waiting for his guest. Being a good host.

Wilson didn’t seem to have matching concerns. The elevator let him out, he spotted Tony, and he marched over with a dangerous scowl on his face. “You want to tell me why I had to get a text from Natasha saying you found him?”

Tony raised his hands as Sam approached. “Hey, whoa, she’s a quicker text than I am, I didn’t know you wanted a personal--”

Sam all but walked him into the wall. “You want to tell me why I didn’t get a message saying you were on your way to get him? You want to tell me why I wasn’t included in this operation?”

“Oh. Okay, that’s a more understandable question.”

Sam waited.

Tony smiled weakly. “Avengers?”

Nope, wrong answer, and Tony skirted away from Sam even as he saw the rage building up behind his formerly-amiable eyes.

“Hey, look, that’s the situation. We got a response about that suspected base in North Carolina, and we suited up. No time to call in reinforcements.”

“No. No, see, that’s not how this works. You knew I was in this, you knew I was looking. That was my intel, that Carolina base. You don’t look for my friend with my intel and not read me in on it because I’m not an Avenger.”

“Okay, that was probably a poor choice of words.”

“What’s a better one?”

Tony thought about it.

Sam ground his teeth when the silence ticked on. “Just keep one thing straight in your head, Stark. Steve Rogers is my friend, that makes what happens to him my business. End of story.”

The door to the room in front of them swished open, and surprisingly it was the Ghost who appeared, frowning at them in still-human, still-non-assassiny annoyance. “Hey, there’s someone sleepin’ in here, keep it down.”

Sam drew back away from Tony, his eyes wide and surprised on the Ghost.

Tony frowned, since there was no way his walls were thin enough that that conversation should’ve been audible. Frigging supersoldiers with supersenses. “Sorry, pal,” he muttered before gesturing over to Sam. “Come on, you want to be read in so bad let’s read you in.”

“No.” The Ghost stood in the doorway regarding them both. He took in Sam seriously for a moment. “You, come in.” His eyes flitted to Tony. “You, no.”

Tony scowled. “Excuse me, but this is--”

The Ghost folded his arms across his chest. It was a gesture that had stilled Tony in a cold wash of fear before, but now, though nothing had physically changed about him, he seemed way more like some stubborn guy making a point and less like he was trapping his own arms because he was two seconds away from leaping and killing everyone in sight.

“You laughed,” he said, eyes on Tony even as he stepped aside to let Sam in. “You don’t laugh at Steve. Nobody does.”

Tony winced. He knew that was gonna come back and bite him on the ass. He drew in a breath, but the door whooshed closed before he could answer, and he found himself alone.

“Banner day for you, sir,” Jarvis piped in like the loudmouth jerk he was.

Tony sagged back against the wall, heaving a sigh.

“Sir, if I might remind you, the hard drives?”

“Right.” Hard drives. Computer data from the place where they’d used their shrink ray on Captain America.

Maybe Tony was fucking up left and right today - and yeah, not including Sam in this mission, that had been a lousy kind of oversight - but he could still get to the bottom of this and get Steve back to normal faster than anyone else in the world.

So that’s what he’d do.


End file.
